Mid-Range Game 23: A Desperate Alliance

[Elbereth she/her]

I might not be converted, but Kreshela is?  

[Frozen Mint she/her]

So I'll vote for Joe, and I may or may not be able to come on again before the end of the game.

[A Joe in the Bush]

@Sart @Stick The three of us can actually control the lynch. I'm moving Drake's vote to Alvron. If you guys feel like helping me out, I'd appreciate it. If not, no hard feelings. 

Good Game everyone.

[Stick. she/her]

Okie Dokie

Alv.

Also you tagged some random other Stick lol 

[DrakeMarshall he/him]

You may be able to steer the lynch, but there's only one person who might stop Joe from dying.

[Sart he/him]

I already cost you the game once. You really think I would go back on that? Joe, peace is the only outcome I'm after.

[Dani she/her]

Joe. The unaligned shall win. 

[Sami she/her]

Joe

[Seonid he/him]

Cycle is over!

[Seonid he/him]

Aftermath: Peace Talks

The death of Rif sparked a short, swift struggle among the survivors on the plateau. Petyr lunged for the last member of the fanatic cult that had dedicated itself to the destruction of the peace talks, but Kreshela's Shardblade swung up to interpose between them. Only Anya's last-second dive between them saved Petyr's eyes from flashing to smoke. As Petyr and Kreshela began to match blades against each other, Dalinar strode in, his massive Shardplate fully intact, and forcibly pushed the two of them apart.

"Stop it! Stop this!" His booming voice echoed across the plateau. For a brief moment, everything stood still.

Then, almost reluctantly, Petyr and Kreshela dismissed their blades. The skirmish sputtered out, as Alethi ambassadors and Parshendi scholarforms dropped their improvised weapons. Eshonai walked forward, and Dalinar stepped aside. Behind him, the body of the last Son of Honor cooled, slain in the fighting despite Kreshela's protection.

Eshonai's voice thrummed to the Rhythm of Resolve. "Are there any else that oppose peace?"

The silence was deafening.

Dalinar stood next to her. "Then shall we proceed with the negotiations?"

-------------------------------------

TBD (A Joe in the Bush) was lynched. He was a Son of Honor Ambassador!

Anya (Daniyah) was attacked and killed. She was a Parshendi Warform!

Petyr and Cranium (Alvron) was attacked but survived.

Vote Count:

A Joe in the Bush (6): Sami, Sart, Elbereth, Daniyah, Frozen Mint, Alvron

Alvron (3): _Stick_, A Joe in the Bush, Drake Marshall

 

The game is over! The Alethi and Parshendi have won! Thank you everyone for playing, and this time you can actually look forward to a retrospective from me.

 

Alethi Player List:

1. Straw @Straw Alethi Guardsman
2. Stick @_Stick_ Alethi Ambassador
3. Samar @Sami Alethi Guardsman
4. Unnamed Character 4 @Sart Alethi Ambassador
5. Kreshela @Elbereth Alethi Highprince

Parshendi Player List:

1. Kyner @Drake Marshall Parshendi Warform
2. Mint @Frozen Mint Parshendi Scholarform
3. Petyr and Cranium @Alvron Parshendi Scholarform Shardbearer

The Dead

1. Plato Anderson (Elenion). Voidbringer Decayform
2. Arbol (Roadwalker). Voidbringer Decayform
3. Locke (OrlokTsubodai). Alethi Artifabrian
4. Aredor (asterion137). Alethi Artifabrian
5. Raaman (Hemalurgic Headshot). Alethi Guardsman
6. Zephyras (Megasif) Ghostblood Ambassador
7. Kintas (Jondesu) Ghostblood Parshendi Warform
8. Unnamed Character 5 (Crimsn-Wolf) Ghostblood Shardbearer (Plate)
9. Unnamed Character 1 (BrightnessRadiant) Son of Honor Highprince
10. Max Mercury (The Flash) Alethi Shardbearer (Plate)
11. Ethelinar (StrikerEZ) Son of Honor Shardbearer (Blade)
12. Corinoc (cloudjumper). Voidbringer Stormform
13. Rif (Yitzi2) Son of Honor Guardsman
14. Anya (Daniyah) Parshendi Warform
15. TBD (A Joe in the Bush) Son of Honor Ambassador

 

Doc Links:

Dead Doc

Parshendi Doc

Voidbringer Doc

Sons of Honor Doc

Ghostbloods Doc

[Elbereth she/her]

 But Alv! I wanted to kill you! I'm sad now...

Congrats to all involved. I've only begun reading the docs, but I'm sure I will have comments later. Currently my only one is clarification to the Sons, since I only explained it to Yitzi - I never actually agreed to protect Striker. I didn't in any way break my agreement.  I didn't respond at all, in fact. If I'd actually said that I was going to protect him I would never have backed out. 

Also, the Voidbringer doc is entertaining. Thank you for continuing to talk to yourself, Cloud.  It provided excellent context. 

[Dani she/her]

2 hours ago, Elbereth said:

 But Alv! I wanted to kill you! I'm sad now...

Whoops, my bad.  

 

[Stick. she/her]

Sorry, Sons of Honour, but vote manip wasn't going to save you. So I didn't bother.

Good game, everybody.

[Hemalurgic Headshot he/him]

Good game! Very interesting at every moment. I see we still got the Unaligned after it seemed so far from our grasps!

Now, I would like to claim moral victory as being one of the few astute purveyors of peace in the game, despite my death.

[Yitzi2]

6 minutes ago, Hemalurgic_Headshot said:

Good game! Very interesting at every moment. I see we still got the Unaligned after it seemed so far from our grasps!

Now, I would like to claim moral victory as being one of the few astute purveyors of peace in the game, despite my death.

Yes, you were.

Which is why it was convenient that you were a likely Ghostblood candidate, and even more convenient when Drake decided he'd rather just kill you than scan you...

[Hemalurgic Headshot he/him]

Man, just reading through the docs and all... I caused quite a few splashes with my PMs, didn't I.

[Yitzi2]

Now, this game clearly did not turn out as intended; it is not often that a rule change in the middle of the game is required, and even then I have to say that it was less fun for some players than Seonid's games often are.  I believe that this is an opportunity to discuss a couple of little-known (read: I just figured them out due to this game) principles of SE game design, so that we can all take them into account in the future:

I. Factions are a stabilizing force, but neutrals are a destabilizing force.  Most of the time, faction games mitigate any game imbalance, and make for closer and more intrigue-filled (and thus more fun) games, while the presence of neutrals does the opposite (though often by a small enough amount that the more complex game format offsets this and makes neutrals still worth including). 

The reason for this is fairly straightforward: In a faction game, only one faction can win.  As a result, if one faction is ahead of the others, the others will temporarily ally in order to balance things out, and if one faction is behind it is more likely to be ignored and give the others a chance to catch up.  Conversely, neutrals can win with any faction, so generally have an incentive to end the game sooner.

This neutral imbalance is mitigated by a few factors:

1. The neutrals are usually weak, having no major resources of their own until the late game (where their numbers may be enough to swing the lynch).

2. The neutrals are usually vulnerable, able to lose via a single lynch or kill, so they can't afford to be too strongly on one side.

3. The neutrals don't have much information about who is on which side.

4. On this forum, neutrals often won't cause one side to win even when they can, because they are portrayed as neutrals and (this being less hardcore than many mafia forums) playing that role is more important for many than winning.

However, in this game, the unaligned Alethi were essentially neutrals (able to win with the Sons or the unaligned Parshendi) with none of these mitigating factors.  They had the numbers to control the lynch and survive having a few of their members lynched or killed, had a strong indication whether any vote would help the unaligned Parshendi or the Sons (due to the public alignments), and were not portrayed as neutrals, encouraging them to pick a side rather than stay out of it.

This created a situation where both unaligned Parshendi and Sons felt that whether they won or not was determined not by themselves but rather by the unaligned Alethi...and that makes for a less fun game.

 

II. Every faction (here defined as a group of people with the same win condition(s)), in order to have fun playing it as a game, needs a path to victory that is both self-sufficient (so they feel that victory is in their hands) and resilient (so they don't feel they can lose by a small amount of bad luck).  What exactly this means depends on the type of path to victory, as they can be divided into a few types:

1. Control of a kill.  This can be something like the elim kill, or the lynch (which is controlled by the village in the sense that if every villager votes the same way, that will decide the lynch).  This is self-sufficient as long as the faction controls that kill, and resilient if the number of actions required to remove it (or remove their control of it) is a significant portion of the number needed to wipe out the entire faction.

The unaligned Alethi had this: They had control of the lynch, and removing that would require taking out a significant number of them.

The Ghostbloods had it: They had a kill, usable until they were all killed.

The Voidbringers were borderline: They had the Stormform kill, but doing so would reveal them, making it easier to take them out.

The unaligned Parshendi did not have it before the rules change (they had no kill at all), and afterward were borderline (the Shardbearer had 3 lives, plus warform would make him very hard to take out, but perhaps not close to as hard as wiping out all the unaligned Parshendi).

The Sons of Honor did not have it: A single unlucky scan, together with the unaligned Alethi deciding to lynch Striker, could have knocked us out early.

2. Manipulating others (e.g. the jester role, which tries to get himself lynched, or someone who tries to get another person lynched).  This obviously is not self-sufficient in the strictest sense, but can still have the same effect if the manipulator has a large information advantage over those to be manipulated (e.g. knowing whom he is trying to take out).  To be resilient, it is necessary both that there are no scan roles that can make this task impossible, and that the number of actions that others must be manipulated into is not too large compared to the number of manipulators (as a rule of thumb, I'd say the difference between manipulations and manipulators should scale with the number of manipulators the same way that elims scale with total players).

This path to victory did not exist in this game, since nobody had an information advantage regarding their targets.  (e.g. the Sons of Honor did not know which Parshendi were unaligned).

3. Non-kill paths to victory.  These are usually the domain of neutrals, and are more often than not self-sufficient and resilient, though they generally cannot contribute to the main conflict of the game.  In this game, there really weren't any, since every faction had enemies they needed to take out.

Thus, the Sons of Honor, and the pre-change unaligned Parshendi, had no path to victory fulfilling the conditions to make the game as fun as it could be, and that also had a significant damaging effect.

[Steeldancer he/him]

I frankly wasn't paying much attention. But yay! Great game every one!

[Jondesu he/him]

We Ghostbloods just got super unlucky, all dying within a short timeframe.  Obviously I'd been exposed, but did those who killed Sif and Crimsn know they were hitting Ghostbloods?  I don't remember if it was stated.

Also, congrats to the neutrals for successfully banding together enough to take out all the other factions!  Drake, I had to admire your tenacity in particular.

[Yitzi2]

3 hours ago, Jondesu said:

We Ghostbloods just got super unlucky, all dying within a short timeframe.  Obviously I'd been exposed, but did those who killed Sif and Crimsn know they were hitting Ghostbloods?  I don't remember if it was stated.

Two of those three hits were Highprince retaliations...I presume that Elbereth and probably BR had a fair suspicion that Ghostbloods would be the ones who'd get caught in it, but it didn't target anyone in particular.

[Alvron he/him]

13 hours ago, Elbereth said:

 But Alv! I wanted to kill you! I'm sad now...

I'm very pleased to disappoint you and very grateful to Dani for sacrificing themselves to keep me alive.

4 hours ago, Jondesu said:

We Ghostbloods just got super unlucky, all dying within a short timeframe.  Obviously I'd been exposed, but did those who killed Sif and Crimsn know they were hitting Ghostbloods?  I don't remember if it was stated.

I killed Mega.  I thought they were a SoH instead of a GB.  I was tossing up between Mega and Crimsn that cycle as I felt they were being just a little too quiet.  Sorry.

[DrakeMarshall he/him]

Well. That was an interesting game. We actually pulled an unaligned win, even though it seemed impossible at the beginning. 

Reading all of those docs has been very interesting. I have to say I am somewhat flattered by the number of times I was mentioned in the Sons of Honor doc. 

Well played everybody...

And sorry to HH. I realize at this point that you could have been a very useful ally indeed. I arranged for your lynch because I wanted to mitigate the heavy losses on the Parshendi. At that point in the game, I think I had cause to be worried about this.

Also, Sami, many thanks for saving my life. I appreciate it.

[little wilson she/her]

11 hours ago, Yitzi2 said:

A single unlucky scan, together with the unaligned Alethi deciding to lynch Striker, could have knocked us out early.

Before I get into this, let me reference a previous game.

MR19 was a rerun of MR10. MR10 had some major issues due to the eliminators having access to a doc, but village communication being very limited. To fix this, MR19’s eliminator team didn’t have a doc - they could only PM. There was also a PM spy in the game - though the PM spy could only see what his target says and not who they’re talking to. Obviously, I knew there was a chance the PM spy would see an eliminator’s PM at some point, so I only put one in the game to reduce those chances.

One of the eliminators forgot about the PM spy, and ended up mentioned all of his teammates in a PM with another elim. Even though there was only one PM spy in the game and even though there was only one elim who did not practice PM safety, that spy spied on that one elim, discovered all the team, and revealed them to the thread at the start of Cycle 2.

Should I have foreseen this? Is MR19’s game distribution broken due to it? I don’t think so. I think there’s a difference between game balance - and therefore broken games - and a game’s robustness - the game’s ability to deal with really bad luck for a specific faction/team. While obvious robustness factors into game balancing, GMs cannot predict every single thing that could go wrong. It’s impossible.
 

To help you understand, here are two obvious robust issues GMs can (and should) balance for:

Balancing a team around a specific 1) person or 2) role.

MR6’s eliminator team was balanced entirely around me being an evil Mistborn. I died the first turn. LG15b’s eliminator team required a specific role to make it to at least mid-game for the team to have a shot at winning the game. There were some other minor distribution issues that made things difficult for the team, but this role was absolutely necessary. That role died before D4.
 

To contrast robust issues and broken mechanics, here’s a broken-mechanics example, using one of the most broken games we’ve ever had - LG4.

In summary of the many mechanics of LG4, there were many safe roles - including one that was GM-confirmed - and a number of protective abilities and mechanics both which heavily favored the villagers over the eliminators. The eliminator team had very few kills that game because of the very many different types of protects in the game. Plus, there were 5+ unlimited use items that could spy on a person’s actions. With a GM-confirmed safe role, untouchable dictator controlling everything, I’m sure you can see how things could be problematic. By the middle of Cycle 5, we knew we’d lost the game. We knew there was literally nothing at all we could ever hope to do to win. This wouldn’t have been too much of a problem, except that the village was gloating about it. We almost quit. A few cycles later, I was the last elim standing, and my goal became just to get the number of living players to single digits before I died. I barely succeeded. And this is with the safe role alignment scanner going inactive by Cycle 3. Had they stayed active, me and my entire team would’ve died by Cycle 7. As it was, I was lynched Day 9. That game had serious problems.
 

There’s a difference between bad luck and broken mechanics. There’s a difference between balance and robustness. And in the end, bad luck just sometimes happens. In LG22, the uber-big bad of the eliminator team who had his own individual kill on top of the team kill was lynched D1. Most of the time, though, really bad luck like that doesn’t usually happen. To play a game worrying about something that could happen that would screw your team over is kind of pointless. What if it doesn’t? You’ve just wasted time worrying about something you didn’t have to.

In fact, in this specific game, had Striker been scanned and lynched early on (unlikely, given the unaligned Alethi's abhorrence of the peace route right from the start of the game), Seonid would’ve made the Blade transferrable. The only reason he didn’t was because by the time he realized there might be a problem there, it was so late in the game that it was too late to fix (I usually tell GMs that if you notice a break in the first 2-3 cycles, you can fix it if you really want, but if it’s later than that, it’s better to let the game play out). But he did acknowledge that as a potential issue. Striker didn’t die until after El (the Kingmaker) decided to go for the unaligned win. Had she continued going for the Sons win, Striker wouldn’t have died at all.

You let a potential bad luck situation (that regardless wouldn’t have gone down how you thought it would) affect your view of the game, impacting the fun you were able to have overall, since you became convinced that you would lose. This is particularly ironic since the Sons had the advantage the entire game until El decided to go more neutral.

In LG6, one of the eliminators decided right at the start of the game that there was no way they could win (I have no idea why; that game was very well-balanced). His influence infected all his teammates though, so instead of playing to win, they just played to screw with the village, because they believed they couldn’t win. While that game was super fun to play, reading through the doc later was actually kind of sad because they were so convinced they didn’t stand a chance, they lost.

Unless a game is really broken (and you can generally tell if you’re on the wrong end of a bad break as an eliminator - there’s a tipping point where everything falls apart and you realize exactly how horribly and utterly screwed you are), you generally have a shot at winning. A defeatist attitude will only set yourself up to lose. And if you’re the type of person who can only have fun if you’re winning or believe you have a chance at winning, then not only are you setting yourself up to lose, but you’re also setting yourself up to have a miserable time playing. You’re compounding the misery, which doesn’t help at all.

So, yeah. Fixating on a potential issue that might cause a problem, maybe, and letting that affect your overall view of the game probably isn’t the best idea. While this game had issues, the Son’s non-transferrable Shardblade was actually among the least of the real problems. If the game was broken, it was actually broken in favor of the Alethi and the Sons in particular. Not against you. Not even remotely.

[DrakeMarshall he/him]

In regard to balancing things... Faction games are hard to balance. It's hard to predict how people will react to them.

And honestly, I had a blast in this game. I was pretty sure I was going to lose for most of the time, but that was quite probably part of what made it so fun.

If I'm going to speak honest with myself, I probably would have developed a more negative attitude if the game went on and the shardblade intervention never happened. Because the unaligned Parshendi couldn't really do anything at the beginning, except persuade another faction to help us (which I attempted extensively, hehe...). But there was intervention. I'm glad the unaligned Parshendi received something that they had as a faction. I'm not sure what the balance would look like if that shardblade was used to aid 3 stormforms, but the blade entered the game after 3 stormforms wasn't a possibility.

I still don't really think we can know how the Voidbringer faction would have played out. They got unlucky, and that happens. I wonder how effective 3 stormforms would have been... Given the abundance of protective roles, it's hard to guess. Depending on how each person used their roles, the kills could have been devastatingly powerful or laughably ineffective. I can't really say I know.

 

For future iterations of this game though... I think my biggest point of feedback is about specific roles, not the overall factions balance (it's really hard to even predict how factions will be balanced, honestly). In my opinion, the highprince(ss) role was extremely powerful.

The basic template of the highprince(ss) seems to be the bodyguard role, which redirects kills from the protect target to itself. The standard bodyguard role isn't exactly groundbreaking. It's one of the weaker power roles, and probably would have been out of place in a role madness faction game.

However, the highprincess has three pretty significant buffs on top of that.

First, it had the powers of an elite bodyguard. Namely, it would kill the attacker in the process of protecting somebody. This role is not at all unheard of (for example, if my memory serves, it appears in roughly half of the ranked games in Town of Salem). But it is generally regarded to be a rather powerful role, because it gives you a nearly confirmed kill on one of the eliminators, in addition to redirecting a kill from an important role to an expendable one.

Second, the highprince had the powers of a pewterarm, gaining an extra life. This is understandable perhaps, given the number of second lives in this game. However, it still compounds the fact that this is a very powerful role.

Third, it could use the protect ability an infinite number of times without dying. This effectively adds in the functionality of a doctor. The doctor-bodyguard combination, as two separate players in a game, can often be regarded as a dangerously powerful combination. In this case, the functionality existed in a single player.

The highprince possessed the powers of an elite bodyguard, doctor, and thug. With a reusable protect ability, it was already capable of denying any kills made by other factions, if it was used to maximum effect. But additionally, it would automatically perform kills against the kill-roles of enemy factions, without even having to learn who specifically is in possession of a kill role.

In this game, I would argue that highprincesses quite directly decided the victories and defeats of the Ghostbloods, the Sons of Honor, and the Unaligned Parshendi. 3/5 factions. I don't say this to demean either highprincess, because they both played an excellent game. But the fact remains that their role was very powerful.

The roles in this game were all fun ideas, but I believe that this one would benefit from some tweaks, for a future game.

I would suggest as a possible alteration: removing the kill function, making it just a doctor role with an extra life. This is fairly easy to justify in RP: the highprincess fights off the attacker, instead of killing them.

Thoughts?

[Yitzi2]

12 hours ago, little wilson said:

Before I get into this, let me reference a previous game.

MR19 was a rerun of MR10. MR10 had some major issues due to the eliminators having access to a doc, but village communication being very limited. To fix this, MR19’s eliminator team didn’t have a doc - they could only PM. There was also a PM spy in the game - though the PM spy could only see what his target says and not who they’re talking to. Obviously, I knew there was a chance the PM spy would see an eliminator’s PM at some point, so I only put one in the game to reduce those chances.

One of the eliminators forgot about the PM spy, and ended up mentioned all of his teammates in a PM with another elim. Even though there was only one PM spy in the game and even though there was only one elim who did not practice PM safety, that spy spied on that one elim, discovered all the team, and revealed them to the thread at the start of Cycle 2.

Should I have foreseen this? Is MR19’s game distribution broken due to it? I don’t think so. I think there’s a difference between game balance - and therefore broken games - and a game’s robustness - the game’s ability to deal with really bad luck for a specific faction/team. While obvious robustness factors into game balancing, GMs cannot predict every single thing that could go wrong. It’s impossible.
 

To help you understand, here are two obvious robust issues GMs can (and should) balance for:

Balancing a team around a specific 1) person or 2) role.

MR6’s eliminator team was balanced entirely around me being an evil Mistborn. I died the first turn. LG15b’s eliminator team required a specific role to make it to at least mid-game for the team to have a shot at winning the game. There were some other minor distribution issues that made things difficult for the team, but this role was absolutely necessary. That role died before D4.
 

To contrast robust issues and broken mechanics, here’s a broken-mechanics example, using one of the most broken games we’ve ever had - LG4.

In summary of the many mechanics of LG4, there were many safe roles - including one that was GM-confirmed - and a number of protective abilities and mechanics both which heavily favored the villagers over the eliminators. The eliminator team had very few kills that game because of the very many different types of protects in the game. Plus, there were 5+ unlimited use items that could spy on a person’s actions. With a GM-confirmed safe role, untouchable dictator controlling everything, I’m sure you can see how things could be problematic. By the middle of Cycle 5, we knew we’d lost the game. We knew there was literally nothing at all we could ever hope to do to win. This wouldn’t have been too much of a problem, except that the village was gloating about it. We almost quit. A few cycles later, I was the last elim standing, and my goal became just to get the number of living players to single digits before I died. I barely succeeded. And this is with the safe role alignment scanner going inactive by Cycle 3. Had they stayed active, me and my entire team would’ve died by Cycle 7. As it was, I was lynched Day 9. That game had serious problems.
 

There’s a difference between bad luck and broken mechanics. There’s a difference between balance and robustness. And in the end, bad luck just sometimes happens. In LG22, the uber-big bad of the eliminator team who had his own individual kill on top of the team kill was lynched D1. Most of the time, though, really bad luck like that doesn’t usually happen. To play a game worrying about something that could happen that would screw your team over is kind of pointless. What if it doesn’t? You’ve just wasted time worrying about something you didn’t have to.

In fact, in this specific game, had Striker been scanned and lynched early on (unlikely, given the unaligned Alethi's abhorrence of the peace route right from the start of the game), Seonid would’ve made the Blade transferrable. The only reason he didn’t was because by the time he realized there might be a problem there, it was so late in the game that it was too late to fix (I usually tell GMs that if you notice a break in the first 2-3 cycles, you can fix it if you really want, but if it’s later than that, it’s better to let the game play out). But he did acknowledge that as a potential issue. Striker didn’t die until after El (the Kingmaker) decided to go for the unaligned win. Had she continued going for the Sons win, Striker wouldn’t have died at all.

You let a potential bad luck situation (that regardless wouldn’t have gone down how you thought it would) affect your view of the game, impacting the fun you were able to have overall, since you became convinced that you would lose. This is particularly ironic since the Sons had the advantage the entire game until El decided to go more neutral.

In LG6, one of the eliminators decided right at the start of the game that there was no way they could win (I have no idea why; that game was very well-balanced). His influence infected all his teammates though, so instead of playing to win, they just played to screw with the village, because they believed they couldn’t win. While that game was super fun to play, reading through the doc later was actually kind of sad because they were so convinced they didn’t stand a chance, they lost.

Unless a game is really broken (and you can generally tell if you’re on the wrong end of a bad break as an eliminator - there’s a tipping point where everything falls apart and you realize exactly how horribly and utterly screwed you are), you generally have a shot at winning. A defeatist attitude will only set yourself up to lose. And if you’re the type of person who can only have fun if you’re winning or believe you have a chance at winning, then not only are you setting yourself up to lose, but you’re also setting yourself up to have a miserable time playing. You’re compounding the misery, which doesn’t help at all.

So, yeah. Fixating on a potential issue that might cause a problem, maybe, and letting that affect your overall view of the game probably isn’t the best idea. While this game had issues, the Son’s non-transferrable Shardblade was actually among the least of the real problems. If the game was broken, it was actually broken in favor of the Alethi and the Sons in particular. Not against you. Not even remotely.

Firstly, I actually felt that, at least early on, the unaligned Alethi were in favor of the peace route.  Clearly one of us was misreading the sentiment.

You are absolutely right about the difference between balance and robustness; however, I would argue that a lack of robustness is even worse for everybody having fun than a lack of balance is...and having kingmakers right from the start of the game is worse than either.

The fact that Striker would have made the Blade transferrable if Striker had been lynched early wasn't much help, since we didn't know that.  IMO, after-the-fact balances decrease fun, since if players don't know they're in store they'll still feel that things are prone to becoming stacked against them, and once they do know (either because it happens, or they're told ahead of time), it makes them feel like what they do doesn't really matter.  Sometimes after-the-fact balances are necessary, but setting them up to be reasonably likely to be necessary just makes things less enjoyable for at least a certain type of player.

You also misunderstand; we were not convinced that we would lose.  We were, however, convinced that a scan of Striker would cause us to lose, and had to play around that.

7 hours ago, Drake Marshall said:

In regard to balancing things... Faction games are hard to balance. It's hard to predict how people will react to them.

And honestly, I had a blast in this game. I was pretty sure I was going to lose for most of the time, but that was quite probably part of what made it so fun.

If I'm going to speak honest with myself, I probably would have developed a more negative attitude if the game went on and the shardblade intervention never happened. Because the unaligned Parshendi couldn't really do anything at the beginning, except persuade another faction to help us (which I attempted extensively, hehe...). But there was intervention. I'm glad the unaligned Parshendi received something that they had as a faction. I'm not sure what the balance would look like if that shardblade was used to aid 3 stormforms, but the blade entered the game after 3 stormforms wasn't a possibility.

I still don't really think we can know how the Voidbringer faction would have played out. They got unlucky, and that happens. I wonder how effective 3 stormforms would have been... Given the abundance of protective roles, it's hard to guess. Depending on how each person used their roles, the kills could have been devastatingly powerful or laughably ineffective. I can't really say I know.

 

For future iterations of this game though... I think my biggest point of feedback is about specific roles, not the overall factions balance (it's really hard to even predict how factions will be balanced, honestly). In my opinion, the highprince(ss) role was extremely powerful.

The basic template of the highprince(ss) seems to be the bodyguard role, which redirects kills from the protect target to itself. The standard bodyguard role isn't exactly groundbreaking. It's one of the weaker power roles, and probably would have been out of place in a role madness faction game.

However, the highprincess has three pretty significant buffs on top of that.

First, it had the powers of an elite bodyguard. Namely, it would kill the attacker in the process of protecting somebody. This role is not at all unheard of (for example, if my memory serves, it appears in roughly half of the ranked games in Town of Salem). But it is generally regarded to be a rather powerful role, because it gives you a nearly confirmed kill on one of the eliminators, in addition to redirecting a kill from an important role to an expendable one.

Second, the highprince had the powers of a pewterarm, gaining an extra life. This is understandable perhaps, given the number of second lives in this game. However, it still compounds the fact that this is a very powerful role.

Third, it could use the protect ability an infinite number of times without dying. This effectively adds in the functionality of a doctor. The doctor-bodyguard combination, as two separate players in a game, can often be regarded as a dangerously powerful combination. In this case, the functionality existed in a single player.

The highprince possessed the powers of an elite bodyguard, doctor, and thug. With a reusable protect ability, it was already capable of denying any kills made by other factions, if it was used to maximum effect. But additionally, it would automatically perform kills against the kill-roles of enemy factions, without even having to learn who specifically is in possession of a kill role.

In this game, I would argue that highprincesses quite directly decided the victories and defeats of the Ghostbloods, the Sons of Honor, and the Unaligned Parshendi. 3/5 factions. I don't say this to demean either highprincess, because they both played an excellent game. But the fact remains that their role was very powerful.

The roles in this game were all fun ideas, but I believe that this one would benefit from some tweaks, for a future game.

I would suggest as a possible alteration: removing the kill function, making it just a doctor role with an extra life. This is fairly easy to justify in RP: the highprincess fights off the attacker, instead of killing them.

Thoughts?

The Highprince role was indeed fairly powerful.

Scanners are also a fairly powerful role (doubly so when they have extra lives, and triply so when they also have a secure doc to reveal their results without their identities).

The main weakness of the Highprince is that they can still only protect one person at a time, so being less predictable is a good defense against them.  (Unless they team up with a "chain" of Warforms; that would have been a dangerous combo.)